skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Robert Storr's criticism is pretty vacuous. Crying reductionism is so common as a criticism of scientific approaches from people in the humanities as to be almost an absurd cliché by now. Pity that he either couldn't come up with something more interesting to say or that the Times couldn't be bothered to quote him on something more substantive.
Now it's redirecting to http://www1.webplatform.org/. So the address of the website for website standards starts with... www1?!?
One reason could be inspiration from Science Fiction.

http://ufopop.org/ufopop_mags.php
Your analysis is a reasonable first cut, but the above question is a good one, and your reply is rather incorrect.

First, you haven't really done a Bayesian analysis, for several reasons.

The easiest problem to fix is, you didn't specify any priors. We could validate your style of calculation by assuming single-engine failures are IID with parameter "p," uniform on the unit interval. (A beta distribution would be the standard conjugate prior.)

If we go ahead and make the uniform-p assumption, then what you've calculated is a most-likely posterior value of "p" (35/36). (This is the maximum-likelihood estimate for p.) But in a Bayesian world, "p" has a full posterior distribution, not just a most-likely value.

So, still in the Bayesian world, the probability of failure (P(N_fail > 2)) must be calculated on the basis of not the most likely p, but the posterior of "p". You didn't do this; you just used the most-likely p.

Which brings us to the second problem with your reply. You really can get a confidence value on P(N_fail > 2). You can get a full posterior distribution! It will be a 1-dimensional density on [0,1]. And you could calculate this, either by simulation or by an analytic procedure (because it's a low-dimensional problem).

This posterior on P(N_fail > 2) would be the answer to the parent's question. It would probably be rather "fat", validating the intuition that we don't have much data.

My reply might be a little smarty-pants. Sorry if it is! As I said, your analysis is a reasonable first cut.
I miss the good old days...dropping $10k a day on adwords on my boss's black AMEX card.
>Government solutions to government created problems.

And the college being expensive is a "government created problem" because?
Why don't you provide object recognition on a large range of classes, like http://www.image-net.org/ for example, and millions of specific objects + ocr, like what google goggles provides http://www.google.com/mobile/goggles/

Your sdk is slow moving and limited for all the resources that your empire has at it's disposal.
Man shot in both ankles in Ardcarne Park
It seems to have a special space meaning:

"Aerospace & Engineering. According to plan or design: a nominal flight check."

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/nominally
How does submitting anonymized orders to a darkpool help insider trading relative to submitting anonymized orders to a public matching engine?

You are correct that dark pools (in principal) benefit institutional investors over predatory HFT's and retail investors, by making it easier to move big blocks without immediate price impact.
Headsmacking SEO Tip: Release Your Blog from It's Subdomain
Is TPB storing personal data?
How Flightfox doubled their remarketing email conversions
It was a blog post explaining to customers why they could no longer pay with PayPal. I don't think it needed to be a polemic.
That anti-excuse reminds me of one of the recent cases where Paypal screwed over a business for using the "Donate" button, because it should be obvious that only registered 501(c) organizations are allowed to use said button.
>There's a measured correlation between maternal age and the incidence of Down's Syndrome and other trisomies - the longer a woman waits to have children, the higher the odds there will be a problem.

The odds of which are still insignificant.
I dont subscribe to the philosophy that one must be in SV to take their idea to the next level or succeed in general. SV is not a shrine for success and coming here isn't a magical formula for success.

Yes, I am in SV, but I feel like other areas also have a thriving startup community just as great as SV.

NYC, Boston, Seattle.

DuckDuckGo for example is in Philly.
That reminds me of a euphemism that I found delightful that I heard once while working for a space company... "achieving submerged geostationary orbit," I think it was.
Twitter outage caused by human error
Pretty much, I'm simply trying to understand what the fundamental value of the currency is. The reason i'm using illegal goods is that they are the only ones i can find whose exchange must be in bitcoing (yes there are some other smaller goods but nothing on that scale).
I'm sure there must be some non-video-game reason lutusp was named an outstanding scientist by the Oregon Academy of Science.
Slime Has Memory but No Brain
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw

> Intro: I have given a talk with this title many times, and it turns out from discussions after the talk I could have just as well have called it "You and Your Engineering Career," or even "You and Your Career." But I left the word "Research" in the title because that is what I have most studied"
Icon font - Ligature Symbols
I assume this means "crashed into the ocean"?
And a third, with a slightly different ending, that may serve as a signpost to geeks with a predilection to romanticize working alone: The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst (http://www.amazon.com/Strange-Last-Voyage-Donald-Crowhurst/d...)
I see this confusion fairly often. Outside of the status of systems/missions etc., nominally often means something like 'in name only'. So to say it's proceeding 'nominally' to someone not familiar with its meaning in this domain sounds like "well, it's going according to 'plan', but ..."
Yea the simplicity is really great. There is a ton of content getting displayed all at once, but it doesn't seem cluttered. You can easily browse all the information and be delighted at the same time.
Agreed, it's the best solution currently available. I use it daily.
Brian Eno's new iPad app lets you build intelligent, reactive ambient music
Yep.

I feel like there was another word in the phrase as used by the engineer I heard it from, but I can't for the life of me remember what it was.
haha. nice. i guess i was just outed. thought the haircut would keep my identity secret a bit longer.
I used to think so too, and yet...

- My current team created a project that lets you run complicated, multi-dependency Java code in an non-blocking manner. Internally, the framework uses topological sorting of a graph of nodes, where each node is a method with potentially blocking code and the dependencies between the nodes are the edges of the graph. The framework is able to set up callbacks automatically in the right order given the above.

- iOS6 auto-layouts internally use constraint solving on a set of linear equations so that you can write code to set the layout of your UI elements in terms of equations (so that you can basically just say that your button should be at 40px left of center of its superview, and with a 100px padding from the bottom).

- I wrote code to improve the accuracy of models at my previous job by employing various machine learning algorithms (thanks Andrew Ng and Coursera).

These might be isolated examples, but my point is that some of the best code I have seen uses a lot of math and CS concepts (sometimes in clever ways).
Virtualization of Raw Experimental Data
Folks - we're talking about some of these comments over using Husky Chat at http://news.ycombinator.com/ right now - come join us :)
This is extremely common in Europe and the UK. It's definitely related to if you afford it. My friends that went to private Schools are mostly taking gap years and most of my friends that went to state schools are going to University or going to work, etc. Interestingly those that went through the state sector tend to know where they want to be going more, I don't want to play to stereotypes but this could be because their were fewer constraints put on them in terms of possible job paths.

It's most likely because in the UK we don't have high school, once you're 16 you finish school and can go to Sixth Form College where you choose 4 subjects to focus on, none are compulsory and get deeper knowledge in what you're interested in. Many people feel that after going through School and Sixth Form they want to take some time to explore before University.

I've personally not gone to University this year and am working on a startup, I can't call it a gap year as although I have traveled a fair amount to speak at conferences, etc I'm still spending all of my time building a company. I definitely believe whatever path people choose, it should be one that has a rationale behind it over following the crowd or what they were taught to believe. Although my Sixth Form did push the idea of University on students my teachers personally agreed with my decision based on everything I'd been doing over the last few years.
Because government (a) tells everyone that they need college, (b) works to make sure that huge floods of loan money are available.
Identify usernames on Facebook by brute-force search of phone numbers
Starting from Scratch in a Digital World
Show HN: Crowdsourced Object Recognition
When studying a musical instrument, it is important to spend your practice time trying to improve. Do not waste time playing parts you are already capable of. Practice must be difficult and push your limits. This is true of many aspects of life, including becoming a better programmer. You should be trying to write programs that you don't know how to write, not yet another client/server database application.
The easiest problem to fix is, you didn't specify any priors.

Read the whole thing more carefully. I started with the calculation for the maximum likelihood estimate, but I ended with a prior with equal a priori likelihoods for failure rates 0%, 0.01%, 0.02%, ..., 99.99%, 100%. This is a reasonable discretization of uniform on the unit interval.

My reply might be a little smarty-pants. Sorry if it is!

I would suggest that before indulging a tendency to be a smarty pants, that it is good to read the whole thing.
Where those weapons get the most energy from depends heavily on the design. It's true that multi-stage thermonuclear devices often have a final fission stage where huge amounts of energy are released, however if one were to purposefully maximize energy release while minimizing fallout there are some relatively clean fusion/fission ratios achievable.

For instance, the test version of the Tsar bomb had its last fission stage removed, reportedly resulting in a 97% fusion detonation. Of course, those still cause a huge lethal neutron flux, but at least the amount of fission material released is pretty small in relation to the overall power of the device.
While I don't think its malicious, remember that PG, Silicon Valley VCs and most of those blogs make money off of the starry eyed young entrepreneurs coming to Silicon Valley. Entrepreneurs essentially are their resources that power those types of businesses. Nothing wrong with it - just remember where people who give out advice are coming from and what they benefit from even if it may benefit you as well.

My personal advice would be to start doing whatever it is you are dreaming about on as little cost as possible and once you identify that your business actually has a true need to be in SV then make the move. It all depends on financial habits and lifestyle but I think many will find that their "normal" middle class lifestyle in SV can gobble through a 100k/yr salary quite easily - its possible to live here on way less but one should be aware of the elevated cost of living.
Hey there -

It's one of the problems with Chrome extensions right now - you're going to have to use it on a new tab to work.... we're figuring that out.

Also - agreed! We just thought we might give people an option, but looks like that's an extra step, so we'll fix our workflow!
I still can't believe that Art.sy was around for over two years before releasing anything. That seems insane, only time will tell.
You right, thanks for correcting me.
Isn't Opus for speech?
>1. I'd say "basic math" is a fairly complex beast. The difference being that children in elementary school are taught how to do math, not how or why math works.

Same thing happens with 99% of "easy" stuff.

E.g if you find cooking easy, it's because a cook only learns how to _do_ cooking, not how or why it works (which would involve chemistry, physics, physiology, math, biology and other stuff).
That's not scary at all. Almost all humans have access to deadly weapons. Please stop it.
Offer HN: free dedicated server for October on Uptano. LIMIT REACHED
Capuchin monkeys reject unequal pay [video]
To cut down on trolls, we decided to start off with oAuths to take care of that issue (hopefully)... thoughts?
A new breakthrough is typically announced shortly before the current round of funding is scheduled to run out.
And as data and disks grow, we'll see write-optimized structures like LSM trees and Fractal Trees in this matrix as well.
But how is he wrong?
First of all, this launch was not a failure, full stop.

I don't know what your background in statistics is, but I'm impressed that you're able to deduce the details of a such a complicated, stochastic process, from only 8 observations, and are willing to extrapolate your predictions for 8 times as many more.

And for someone who loves to comment negatively on SpaceX/Tesla posts, maybe you could spend 5 minutes looking at their Wikipedia pages and see that yes, there have been failures (i.e. unable to achieve stated mission goals and sometimes destroying payloads).
Ah. That explains it. I did not know that meaning of the word, and the explanation I checked at:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/nominal
only showed the meanings that I was familiar with.

Live and learn, I guess. Thanks frabcus!
I suspect that we could reorder some class offerings to improve the "throughput" of a math program. I can divide my math education career into before and after the semester I took the course based on Smith/Eggen/St. Andre's "A transition To Advanced Mathematics." Mathematics is proofs, and knowing how to speak them is completely critical. After that course, I could do mathematics much more easily than before. I feel that this book is fundamental to learning mathematics. And the majority of that is being blooded in the art of proof by contradiction and proof by induction.
Do these guys know what they are doing? I am worried that you will end up doing lots of work for free.

Warning Signs:

* These are some people you met, who are founding a startup.

* You are a uni student with only amateur web development skills

* They are trusting you with developing their idea

* They have a very bullish goal to break even after just 1 year

I would be sceptical that they will not be able to raise the 2M Euro. They will have you work on the project and it will go no where.
It is easy enough to modify the linked script for any scenario that you want.

If 2 engines failed on the next launch, the model would predict a 4.8% chance of failure on the following launch.

As for your "build your model from a billion launches and 20 million failures" comment, if I had that much data, then it wouldn't much matter what reasonable set of priors that I started with, I'd wind up convinced that the true failure rate was very close to 2%.

Note that the prior that I am talking about is the distribution of possible theories before I saw ANY data.
Your Klout score must be greater than 35 to read this
Apparently not

http://www.opus-codec.org/

> Opus is a totally open, royalty-free, highly versatile audio codec. Opus is unmatched for interactive speech and music transmission over the Internet, but also intended for storage and streaming applications
START TELLING THE TRUTH
Giving away some free servers during October to some fellow HN'ers. The beta code is good for one server hardware claim and 500 GB of bandwidth during October.

Uptano is my new project and I'm looking for early adopters and feedback. Enjoy, and Thanks!

Edit: Opened up some more slots for people.
I think I know what you're saying: times and times again, unknown people with no diplomas have found success in the tech industry. However that just means that it's possible to succeed without credentials or education.

But that doesn't mean the industry doesn't care about them. Look at how many stories mention "founded by ex-Googlers/Facebook", "YC-backed", etc. Sure, these are just from tech blogs, but if they add it in there it's because the readership reacts to that information, most often positively.

Besides, I don't think any industry doesn't care about credentials, since at least someone's reputation is their credential. For example, I don't know much about John Resig besides the fact that he created jQuery. That fact would open him many doors. It's not about education, but it's still credentials. Don't you think YC would instantly back him?

More to the point, I'm totally convinced that adding "YC-backed startup" to your resume, even if said startup never really went anywhere, is a very strong credential in a lot of places and I wouldn't be surprised if people use it that way. I'd even say that I'm sure many YC applications are "YC or nothing" in that if they don't get in, they won't start a company. It doesn't hurt to apply but the upside is fantastic: you get access to a great network, media coverage, some automatic seed money… and that YC stamp you can put on your resume.
Totally awesome ... using something like Vero for email marketing is really a no-brainer
Unchain Your Developers
Lessons learned from the restaurant across the street
Fusion power is actually already above break even. There are a lot more practical engineering problems with fusion power before that means anything, though. Most of these problems have to do with materials science: Plasma is incredibly difficult to contain, and it's very difficult to design a cooling system that could work sustainably. Without a cooling system, there is no way to make use of the heat generated in fusion.
>I don't think so. The "spread the work around" will be through the diversity of COTS projects, of which SpaceX is only one.

Congress certainly isn't above putting these kinds of restrictions on COTS project funding. If they can't, then they'll just zero out the COTS funding and fund everything through traditional cost+ projects. The biggest hole in the the thinking of space enthusiasts is the gap between their perception of space projects and How Things Work politically. To me and you it's all about science and fancy engineering and, you know, going where no man has gone before.

To Congress these projects are just a way to bring jobs to the district and get campaign contributions flowing. That's where their consideration ends. They don't even care if anything actually works as long as the jobs are there. That's why Constellation is still alive, and why NASA has ten different campuses. That's why it took twenty years longer than it should have to kill the space shuttle. Hell, that's why mission control is in Houston instead of Florida.

SpaceX will not be immune from the laws of political gravity. The only way they're going to be able to stay relatively efficient is to stick with the commercial market. But Elon Musk seems fixated on Mars, so I doubt that's how things will play out.
Hm. I have never heard that meaning of the word previously, and the link I previously provided (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/nominal) also did not show that specific meaning (unless I am too blind to see it!). I do find it interesting though that you seem to think that it is commonly used in this sense, so I guess I am not moving in the right technical (aeronautics) circles :-)
Thanks for the feedback.
> Is there a sequence of fewer than 16 instructions to spot a NUL byte inside the 16 byte block?

Yes:

pxor %xmm1, %xmm1
pcmpeqb (mem), %xmm1 // Do 16 byte-wise compares
pmovmskb %xmm1, %eax // Move results into the low 16 bits
test %eax, %eax
jnz saw_null
Ok, so you are providing a service like Odesk and those types of sites. Cool, nothing wrong with that. There certainly is a huge need for this right now. Just come out and say it. Let me help you with that (using your own words).

Work.io allows you to hire skilled workers without the need to interview them one by one. Just join, define a task, price it, and get the results. Work.io works with a pool of talented people to deliver what you need. No resources wasted. Better results. Our focus is to streamline your work process by taking care of finding the people you need to get things done, at your price.
Unfortunately #2 is extremely unlikely to be true. Engine failures are very related in very unexpected ways. The SpaceX guys have worked very hard to make them as independent as possible but with so many failure modes it is impossible to say that an engine failure (i.e. explosion) will have no impact on its neighbors.
The classification of works of art is a far cry from, say, taxonomy in biology. I'd submit that there's nothing really scientific about it. But even if there were, let me just quote David Perkins summarizing Benedetto Croce (on literature, but the point is transferable):

The individual quality or difference of a work of art is the special locus of its value. Since taxonomies are based on features texts share, they foreground what is least interesting about them.
I could. But that would be inappropriate here. The lower bound of any such interval would be astonishingly close to a failure rate of 0, while the maximum likelihood estimator is itself fairly close to 0. Therefore any reasonable set of priors usually puts you in the upper tail.

For instance one such interval has a MLE of an engine failure rate of 2.78%, a lower bound of 0.1% and an upper bound of around 15%. (Corresponding rocket failure rates range from 1 in 10 million to about 9.9%.)
Browser base64 support
No, it just became a "Falcon 8" while enroute.

DUDE, give them a break.....

read next line

Oh. OH! I have no business commenting on this subject.
Tech Lifetimes vs People Lifetimes
Yup.

I invite you to create a toy model that takes that into account in some way and see what answers you come up with.
From what I've learnt of Facebook's attitude, it's more that you won't be fired if you take the site down (at least, the first time). I don't believe that they don't care when you break things, and that wasn't what I was advocating.
Regarding luxury travel search, won't people who can afford 1st class everything just pay an assistant or someone else to handle all the details?
Seems like you're slacking off, unless you meant your other 100%?
Electoral College outcomes as a partitioning problem
Corporate Identity Theft – Perhaps the biggest risk is where you least expect it
How not to launch your company
I think combined fusion/fission options are the clear choice for the future. (Also, yes, that is what the H-bomb does, and no, that is not what the sun does.)

Here's how combined fusion/fission plants would theoretically work:

A fusion reaction is used to create a large quantity of high-energy neutrons. These high-energy neutrons are then used to cause fission in an otherwise subcritical fission assembly with extremely low enrichment fuel. 'Natural' uranium (U-238) is fissionable, which means that it can undergo fission in the presence of /high energy/ neutrons.
Why I just turned down my first investors
^^^ This x1000, all of the kids starting businesses and using the cool new thing Google Apps and forwarding it to their personal Gmail account have no concept of this.
3D Printing in Minecraft